TO DREAM ANEW

"I am awake now; it has all been a dream."
—page 84, Notes from a Bottle Found on the Beach at Carmel by Evan S. Connell




My mind bedevils me, awakens me from slumber, at the cusp of night, in the middle of the morning.

I finish the final chapters of A Life of Picasso: The Triumphant Years, 1917–1932—a last chapter and an epilogue. I intended to complete them, and it, before retiring, but my eyes were lidded, heavy.

I reread Heather McHugh's "The Fabric: A Poet's Vesalius" from December 2007's Poetry—partly to refresh myself with her rendering of the anatomical wonderings and wanderings of Vesalius's and Titian's bone-men and muscle-men, partly to connect them to Picasso's Vesalius-influenced "Bone period" in my mind, partly to gather epigraph's and quotes for future use, partly to invite slumber once again.

Now, however, I am engaged, reticent to sleep, for I am manic and inspired. I must dream anew. I must reconstruct that which I cannot explicate.